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The Making of Ghostbusters on the Commodore 64
Next Generation recently began running content from the respected British gaming magazine Edge, and today they're sharing The Making of Ghostbusters. The article is a look back to a barely-remembered but (for the time) forward thinking movie tie-in for the Commodore 64. Instead of a lame 'action' title following the movie's plot line, the game was set in the world of the Ghostbusters, and allowed players to build a financial empire through ghostbusting. "Crucially, for a game with so many parts - driving, simple resource management, shooting and trapping ghosts - the pieces snapped together well, and the money-making, business-upgrading elements gave the game a lasting replayability. Activision's Ghostbusters is polished, intelligently-paced, and suggests a measured and meticulous development approach: something which wasn't the case at all. 'A typical C64 game took nine months from start to finish,' laughs David Crane, the game's designer. 'Ghostbusters took six weeks!' Crane is one of the most prolific developers of the early videogame era. Creating titles such as Little Computer People and Pitfall made him Activision's star programmer."
waaay to difficult to pick up category for me. I only managed to drive around, until I got tired of it and skipped to the next game.
Simple games with builtin psychological rewards always do well. Taipan is a good example of this... empire building is a classic videogame meme.
...But I digress. TREMBLE PUNY HUMANS!ONE DAY MY SPECIES WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
It brings back memories of driving the ghost busting mobile down the streets and capturing ghosts. building and customizing the car and people for better catching was amazing back then. I'm feeling old now.
Ghostbusters took six weeks!
And that was one of my favorites back on the C64. It was very addictive. This really shows it's the overall creativity and playability that matters most in a game, not necessarily the complexity or graphics.
Interesting coincidence that it's posted on the same day as someone from Microsoft belittling the Wii for its lesser graphics and simplicity. Doesn't make it less fun!
Developers: We can use your help.
Man, did I ever love this game back then! I still fire up the C64 or SMS emulators every so often to replay it. A full-page ad for the game, torn from some computer magazine, had a place of honor among the posters on my wall.
The game gets a bad rep nowadays, usually because of the botched NES port made by a team of crack-smoking monkeys, but the original will always be one of my all-time favorite computer games.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Yeah, my memmories are from the NES version. I never realized that there was a better c64 version. I got into c64 just as it was dying ;(
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Here's a Youtube video for anyone who wants to relive old memories. :-)
Six weeks, eh? I suppose this was back when games were simple enough where all developers had to be intimiately familiar with the hardware and code Just Worked(tm).
All the work done in code patterns and abstractions seem to have distanced developers from the metal. It's a necessary evil in some aspects (since the actual C64 hardware was always exactly the same so some safety stuff could be glossed over), but I've always wondered how some of the greats (like Crane) would have fared had they grown up 20 years after they did.
More Twoson than Cupertino
It's......not.....dead.......yet.....!!!!
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http://www.firebox.com/index.html?dir=firebox&act
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C64_Direct-to-TV
Layne
There's something you need to type in the beginning to get the Ecto1. I forget what it is, but it gives you like near infinate cash, and buying stuff in the beginning was like the most fun part.
God spoke to me.
I loved the game, too, but I was only 7 or 8 at the time. :) It was the first computer game I really played, on a C64 at the Boys Club. My parents soon bought us a Tandy 1000 EX and gave it to us for Christmas. I remember them surprising us with it with the Ghostbusters game playing on the screen. I played a ton of that game.
Was pretty amazed to discover that someone made a remake of the game for Windows.
http://files.filefront.com/Ghostbusters/;6357091;/ fileinfo.html
I didn't enjoy it quite as much but that's because somethings seem different than what I remember of the game play. Anyone else try this remake? Would love to get opinions on this.
"First, if you want to design a game around a licence, you have to be very careful. The best strategy is to design an original game that would stand alone even without the licence. Our original theory was that a licensed game should be a great game first, and a licensed game second. The success of the Ghostbusters game reinforced our belief - that was clearly the right way to go."
if only others thought this way...
Anyone else read this as...
"We sold this game at full price to marks who bought on brand name only and then laughed all the way to the bank. Thanks - suckas!"
(Long story short, I think the "license the movie tie-in and then release the cheapest game you possibly can" mentality is still out there and has never gone away.)
I played the hell out of the Sega Master System version was I was younger. Looking at the videos of the NES port, I'm glad I had what I did, that looks horrible.
I think it's high time for the next-gen systems to come out with a present-day port! The concept would still be fun, I think, a lot of solid gameplay ideas ripe for using again.
shame on us / for all we have done / and all we ever were / just zeroes and ones
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Back then, you played a game longer than it took the people that made it to code it!
Today, you can already feel lucky when you get a week of fun for every manyear invested.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Heh... I remember some earlier interview where he talked about it as an example of a game you couldn't do on the Atari 2600.... but then later I saw a fairly decent port. (To be fair, they may have been having bigger ROMs to work with by then...)
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
The cheatcode was Ghostbusters company's phone number "5552368" in the movie.
Where's the making of Zak McKracken? Now that was a sick game, possibly the best C64 game I have played. My uncle used to have hundreds.
"If you plant ice, you're gonna harvest wind."
No, your right it never really died, it was just zombie-fied. Its fun to watch pillage the countryside and devour human brains, but its not the sharpest bulb in the drawer.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Next Generation running an article on the making of a C64 game.
"A little too ironic...and, yeah, I really do think...
It's like RAIIIIIIN.."
Hooray for Fridays!
Cheat mode: Use the name 'GOO' and the password '11111111' to start with plenty of cash if you're impatient.
The opening of the game had digitized speech (!) and bouncing ball lyrics of the whole movie theme ... Really a great job.
--Slashcode bug # 497457 - unfixed since December 2001 - Go look it up!
o/~ Join us now and share the software
My short term memory is so bad that at least 2-3 times every day I forget what I was saying in mid sentence. I have the attention span of a mosquito (I've already stopped twice so far while typing this to do something else), and on a bad day if there are any distractions whatsoever have difficulty carrying on a conversation.
And yet truly random bits of information get etched into permanent memory with no regard to their utility. This is a perfect example. In the 23 years since I saw Ghostbusters in the theater I've never once not been able to spit out their phone number off the top of my head. But things like what I had for dinner last night or who the last person I spoke with 30 min ago are a complete fog to me.
Seriously, what the hell is wrong with me, and does this happen to anyone else? I'd suspect that I have some form of low level anterograde memory dysfunction except that it's inconsistent.
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
I remember playing the Apple II port a ton when I was a kid. Great game.
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
Developers still code to a platform, it's just an OS or a toolkit now, as opposed to specific hardware (though they do that too with SSE and such). Machines have gotten more complex, more needs to be abstracted out to allow the platform to reasonably workable with. This is not just with the IT industry btw, it happened with textiles, farming, boat building, etc. As an industry gains levels of complexity, the ability (and need) to work with the lowest layers become less. There's always a place for those who can work with the low level stuff, but the abstraction makes things simpler for many other things.
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
Conglaturation!!! You beaten a great game
Now I see why it only took 6 weeks
Make SELinux enforcing again!
HRR SRIMED MRREEE!!
Just imagine what Duke Nukem Forever will be like!
It was written for a wide variety of consoles, including the Atari 2600!
What, me worry?
So it's basically Ghostbusters Tycoon, eh?
Sweet. The thought of minimaxing the tech development and customization of the blinking light ghost trap (as opposed to the positron collider* backpacks) such that, by the endgame, I can open one trap and suck down the nimble mynx in a 1-shot, makes me drool more than discovering a home video of Jessica Simpson and Shakira drinking a little too much, if you know what I mean.
* I know nobody has actually collided two positrons yet, with physicists thinking electrons may be a fundamental dimensionless point particle more akin to a quark than a composite particle like protons and neutrons. That's just our little nerd humor** regarding the device from the movie, heh heh.
** Like knowing the incorrect answer to "Yeoman Rand's cabin number" is Y390.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Angry Videogame Nerd tackled the ghost busters games in a 3-part video series...
east coast models